Way back in September 2010, one of the first posts I added to WPLift was a roundup of Coupon Code plugins, since then one of my favourite WordPress theme companies AppThemes have released there own coupon code theme called “Clipper” and provided me with a copy to review. AppThemes make very high quality themes which serve a single purpose, in the past I have reviewed their Classifieds Theme and Job Board Theme.

Installing The Theme

Once you have WordPress installed, download the theme from AppThemes and unzip it. Inside this zip there is a readme file and another zip file named clipper.zip. In your WordPress admin screen, click “Appearance” > “Themes” > “Install Themes” > “Upload” you will now be presented with an upload box, use this to upload the clipper.zip file.

Now click “Activate” under the Clipper theme :

Before we start configuring the theme, visit “Settings” > “Permalinks” and tick “Custom Structure” and enter this in the box : /%postname% that will make the site use nice search engine friendly urls instead of the default WordPress ones.

Configuring the Coupon Code Site

Once you have the theme enabled, you will see in your admin sidebar, two new menus; “Clipper” and “Coupons”. Clipper is where you configure the theme options and “Coupons” is created using custom taxonomies to allow you to add a coupon code, set up coupon code categories, stores, coupon tags etc. First we will take a look at the Clipper settings.

Clipper Menu

Dashboard

The first item on the new Clipper menu is Dashboard, This is where your coupon code stats are displayed – it shows live coupons and pending coupons along with a graph display to show you how many are added each day. It also features news and tweets from AppThemes so you can catch any update notifications etc.

General Settings

The next menu item is “Settings” which is split into 4 tabs – General, Security/Reports, Advertising and Advanced. The General tab is all about your sites look and feel with options to change the color scheme ( 5 colors are included ), upload your own logo and favicon, enter twitter, facebook, feedburner urls and various other preferences. The Security Reports tab allows you to enter reCaptcha details and has options for allowing people to report dead codes and offensive content etc. The advertising tab allows you to insert a 336 x 280 advert within your blog posts. The final tab; Advanced is for fine tuning your site and choosing file paths – you shouldn’t need to touch this one.

Emails

The emails menu item is for configuring the two emails the system sends out – New user registration and new coupon code submission. You can enable or disable these two emails and customise the content of them.

Importer

The next menu item is a nice touch – an import system so you can populate your site with coupon codes. You will need them in the form of a .CSV file and they must be formatted correctly – an example is provided for you with the theme in the “examples” folder.

System Info

The final menu item on “Clipper” is System info – this provides information about your hosting should you need to troubleshoot something, it also lists the CRON jobs which the theme uses and has an uninstall menu should you wish to remove all traces of the Clipper theme from the database.

Coupons Menu

Ok now lets take a look at the other custom menu, the theme created – “Coupons”.

The first item on the Coupons menu is “Coupons” – this is where all your coupon codes that have been submitted are listed. If you click on the menu you will see the theme added one default coupon code called “Amazon”. Here you will see listed: The Store Name, Category, Coupon Code, Votes, Clicks and CTR.

The other menu items in the Coupons menu are fairly self-explanatory, you have “Add New” “Categories” “Coupon Tags” “Stores” and “Coupon Types”. You should go through these and populate them with information that is relevant to your site. The theme has added some starter categories, tags and types for you so you can see an idea of what to put.

Take a look at the demo of the theme with coupon codes populated :

Conclusion

I think this is another slick theme from AppThemes – If you are thinking about creating a coupon code site or adding a coupons section to an existing site then this is a great option. The coding is spot-on as with all AppThemes, the design is functional and looks like it can be customised to match your site with the use of the built-in color schemes and logo upload facility. The back-end is nicely laid out and easy to use – full documentation is provided to buyers so you should have no problem figuring out how to get your site up and running.

Glad to hear you have had a positive experience with Coupon Code Plugin…I on the other hand have found their customer service lacking. Particularly, they have no idea about actual coding. This plugin does not work on my site, I have told them EXACTLY what needed to be done to get it to work, yet all they insist on is gaining access to my admin area!

Not only that, they do not honor their money back guarantee. Oh yea, customer service? Totally not there. Stay away from these guys, you would be much better off going with AppThemes.

Hello, we do indeed honour our guarantee. We explained to you what we needed no fewer than two times. This information was required so that we could customize our plugin (free of charge) for your website. You failed to provide any of the information we asked for. As such, we can not complete the customizations. This was explained to you in detail a number of times. You then opened a fraudulent dispute with paypal, making bogus claims which paypal did not uphold. We stand by our guarantee and we will happily go to any court of law and prove that we have stood by our guarantee every single step of the way. We have never, nor would we ever, refuse a refund when it fell in line with our guarantee.

Please feel free to contact us and tell us that we can release your support tickets so that everyone can see what you said. This will allow everyone to see that we worked with you and you failed to provide the information required.